“Signs” by Five Man Electrical Band

Les Emmerson, frontman of Canada's Five Man Electrical Band, came up with "Signs" on the road along Route 66, heading back to Los Angeles from Canada and getting steadily sore about all the billboards and big signs blotting out the scenery. The band cut it for Good-byes and Butterflies in 1970, and at first it went nowhere: MGM stuck it on the flip of "Hello Melinda Goodbye", a single that stalled at 55 in Canada.

Then Lionel Records put it back out in 1971 with the song finally on the A-side, and Emmerson's gripe took off: No. 4 in Canada, No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, a gold record, and Billboard's No. 24 song of the year. Some stations clipped the instrumental intro and trimmed the coda to squeeze it onto the air, and in 2004 Fatboy Slim sampled it for "Don't Let The Man Get You Down".

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.